Xara Web Designer 7: Rolex features on a Timex budget
Creating a modern, professional website can be a complex business, requiring a host of skills: design, HTML, scripting, Flash, graphics optimisation -- the list goes on. Which, if you've yet to master any of these, may seem just a little intimidating.
Fortunately Xara Web Designer 7 offers a much simpler alternative. It's a WYSIWYG web editor that includes a host of attractive web templates to get you started, and makes it easy to customize them with all kinds of content, even if you've no web development experience at all.
This focus on ease of use is obvious from the moment you launch the program. An "Introduction" website template appears, and just browsing its pages explains how to do everything from changing color schemes, editing text and rearranging objects, to creating navigation bars, applying rollover effects to photos, or customizing your pages with videos, Google Map widgets, and more. It's a simple way to begin learning the Web Designer basics, and you can view an online version of this demo for yourself at Xara's site.
Of course the program also comes with plenty of templates in its Design Gallery, each of which have multiple pages and built-in navigation bars. A quick double-click opens your template of choice, and all you then have to do is customize it, replacing the default text and images with your own. There are a few complications here (elements of your templates are on layers, and locked, so they can't accidentally be changed) but it didn't take us long to figure out how this worked, and most people should have their first basic site ready in just an hour or so.